Space Future has been on something of a hiatus of late. With the concept of Space Tourism steadily increasing in acceptance, and the advances of commercial space, much of our purpose could be said to be achieved. But this industry is still nascent, and there's much to do. So...watch this space.

China, a country with over 4500 years of recorded history, gave the world, gunpowder, paper, compasses, movable type, and even the seismological detector. Now China has one more bullet point to its list of achievements: It’s the third country to have docked two spacecraft in orbit.

Space is a dirty place. Over 16,000 pieces of debris over 10 cm wide have been left behind since Sputnik took to the skies in 1957. And now the Swiss want to do something about it. Scientists with the Swiss Space Center at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, are developing a “janitor” satellite, known as CleanSpace One, to make space tidier.

Satellite and missile defense manufacturer Orbital Sciences is about slicing off a piece of that space tourism pie: Orbital announced, via Twitter, its second entry into the commercial crew and cargo delivery business with a private space plane called Prometheus.

There’s only one way to get from Earth to the
International Space Station (
ISS): First, you have to pay about $30 million for a seat on a Russian Soyuz. Then, you spend six months learning both Russian and other necessary skills to handle yourself in weightlessness and during possible emergencies. Only then can you join the elite seven civilians who have made the trip to date.

We all know by now that Britain has survived another election and another change of names and faces, most of them not at all familiar to us here in the colonies. Quite often, when the administration changes, so do many of the programs, policies, and priorities the previous administration tried so hard to implement. Sometimes that’s a good thing, like cancelling the over-budget, behind schedule, and outdated Constellation project begun during the Bush administration, but sometimes good programs are halted or just don’t have the support they need.

Here on Earth, the problem of trash has become an eco-minded opportunity for recycling and reuse. But in space, trash is nothing but a problem. Debris in low Earth orbit (
LEO), such as rocket slag and defunct satellites, are becoming a congestion hazard.

New York City is home of the Empire State Building, the New York Yankees, Central Park, and the office of the Space Future Journal. And if Senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand and Congressperson Jerrold Nadler have their way, New York will have a new bullet point on the list of local destinations: a space shuttle.